What started as a 15 min script for my model railroad became a three and a half week distraction. But here it is, my most recent and one of my more advanced extensions.
Eneroth Laser Tools helps with several steps of the laser cutting workflow that I previously have had to do manually.
It can convert a simple face model into components of a uniform thickness, form box joints where they overlap and help quickly lay them out on a flat plane to export a drawing for the laser cutter.
I sold it after the first lock down, it was taking a lot os space in the flat, and making a lot of dust… too much dust for me since I was locked inside.
that’s a nice power range, I had a 40-45w full spectrum hobby, 40w is strong enough that you can work thick materials, but mall enough that it’ll sit on a table
I don’t have a good place for it so I’m going to donate it to my local FIRST Robotics team. We’ll have good uses for it there and I’ll still have access to it when I need it.
Very interesting Christina, and very simple to use, huge kudos! Working through a quick experiment model, it was simple to create the joints, and simple to adjust the few corners that couldn’t be resolved in both directions, so definitely a great tool!
The plugin is great, it saves a lot of time. Now I am trying to use it to unfold all the pieces of woodworking project and some of the components are still vertical after unfolding. I suppose this is somehow related to axes of components, do you have an idea if there’s an easy fix for such issue.
Edit:
I’ve just checked and I see that those vertical components have their thickness along green or red axes instead of blue one.
AFAIU this can be fixed with “adjust axes” tool provided by plugin but this can be rather time consuming for bigger model. So now the question is if it’s possible to “normalize” axes for all components at once and if my modelling technique is to blame for those axis misalignment?
Edit:
Also I don’t get how to use adjust axes properly. It aligns the axes’ zero to one of component’s angles or middle points but it does not let me to switch green and red axes. The only way I was able to switch green and red axes was using another corner as a zero point.
Can someone tell me what I might be doing wrong here?
These adjacent edges won’t resolve both edges (the way that the other edge successfully did).
(I attached file, which includes copy of original solid model.)
I haven’t used the extention YET (looking forward to it) but, you might want to check out the link ateliernab posted above. It mentions how it doesn’t always work on all edges.
What a great extension! Joined up specifically because of it.
I send files for laser cutting in steel and aluminium. I need to have a 0.1mm clearance between the box tab and receiving rectangle and the matching part.
From what I can see, the tabs created with the extension fit with no option to adjust the Tolerance to allow for cutting?
For v2, if you do one, could you please add an option to set how much to subtract off the male and female part of the box joint? Ie 0.05mm off both part would give 0.1mm clearance on the 2 sides.
